Longform has a list of the best essays from 2011, which is awesome. The site itself was linked earlier, but I would urge anybody who hasn't been on that site to go through it and read everything. They have lists of the best essays sorted by genre, and they are all pretty awesome.

New York has a long piece on long-term care of the elderly and terminally ill. The most chilling part, for me, is the financial horror of deciding how much of these health costs and insurance costs are even worth it, having to make those kinds of calls on a financial basis.

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is factually accurate and one of the few major histories that is leftist in interpretation of these facts. Howard Zinn gave permission for the entire book to be put here http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html but the publisher does not agree. If you've never read it before, A People's History is amazing. If you're American, you'll question what the fuck kind of country you've been living in. Give it a shot, it's a well-written massmarket counter-narrative to the popular American historical understanding.